BY BTL STAFF
NEW YORK – Following the arrests of Rentboy.com chief executive and several employees Aug. 25, national LGBT organizations have called attention to the decriminalization of sex work.
Rentboy.com started in 1997 and allows male escorts to advertise themselves for a fee. Federal authorities seized the website and business and personal assets of seven current and former company executives of Rentboy.com, self-described as the largest male-escort website, for "conspiring to violate the Travel Act by promoting prostitution," and have deemed it an "Internet brothel."
CEO of Rentboy.com Jeffrey Hurant, 50, defended his company telling the media, "I don't think that we do anything to promote prostitution. I think we do good things for good people, and we bring good people together."
"As alleged, Rentboy.com attempted to present a veneer of legality, when in fact this Internet brothel made millions of dollars from the promotion of illegal prostitution," said acting U.S. Attorney Kelly T. Currie.
The Transgender Law Center, National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, The National Center for Lesbian Rights and Lambda Legal issued a statement Aug. 20 in support of a resolution authored by Amnesty International urging for the decriminalization of sex work, declaring "sex worker rights are human rights."
"As LGBT rights organizations in the U.S., we join to applaud and support Amnesty International's recent resolution to protect the human rights of sex workers by calling for decriminalization of sex work, while simultaneously holding states accountable in preventing and combatting sex trafficking, ensuring that sex workers are protected from exploitation and enforcing laws against the sexual exploitation of children," the statement reads in part.
Each organization authored their own response following the Rentboy.com arrests which brought attention to the U.S. policies on sex work that directly harm LGBT U.S. citizens and called out the allocation of federal resources as "misguided" and "a terrible waste of resources."
"With this raid, the U.S. federal government is not only jeopardizing countless people's lives and only source of livelihood, but sending a clear and troubling message that the country is less invested in addressing systemic issues of racial, economic and anti-LGBT injustice than in further criminalizing the individuals most marginalized by those systems," The Transgender Law Center wrote in a statement.
"Like Amnesty International, the World Health Organization and other medical and human rights organizations, NCLR strongly opposes criminal prosecution of sex work by adults. Experience and evidence have shown that criminalization serves only to make those who are vulnerable to harms associated with sex work even more vulnerable. The criminal charges against Rentboy.com by the Department of Homeland Security and the Department of Justice are misguided and a terrible waste of resources. We are especially concerned about the negative impact on LGBT individuals who have been driven to sex work after being rejected by their families and experiencing other types of discrimination. NCLR strongly recommends that the federal government adopt a strategy aimed at providing essential supports – education, jobs, housing – to LGBT youth and adults who have been marginalized by these serious harms," said executive director of the National Center for Lesbian Rights, Kate Kendell.
Escorts posted ads including their penis size, pay rate and preferred fetishes and site visitors could then contact them directly. All activity was negotiated between the escort and the client. The federal complaint states that even with a disclaimer telling visitors that they could not exchange money for sex, those acts were "clearly" happening.
"There are so many other important investigations that federal resources should be focused on right now instead of sex workers. Take the appalling murders of trans women of color — now at epidemic proportions across our nation. Sex work is a fact of life — it has been, it is and it will be as long as human beings are around. Criminalization puts the livelihoods, health and lives of sex workers in jeopardy. It's time for our federal justice system to get its priorities straight and it's time once and for all to decriminalize sex work," said Russell Roybal, deputy executive director, National LGBTQ Task Force.
Each defendant could face up to five years in prison and up to $250,000 in fines.
